Breaking News: Patricia Krenwinkel Recommended for Parole

Readers of Yesterday’s Monsters who followed the legal drama that accompanied the release of Leslie van Houten might want to know: Patricia Krenwinkel, the oldest female prisoner in California, has been recommended for release by the parole board. Bob Egelko of the Chronicle reports the predictable positions of both sides:

In prison, Krenwinkel has a clean disciplinary record, earned a college degree and has taken part in community-service programs, working to support other inmates with mental illnesses. At her 2022 parole hearing, she said that after dropping out of school and becoming an infatuated member of Manson’s so-called family at age 19, “I allowed myself to just start absolutely becoming devoid of any form of morality or real ethics.”

In a statement released by Krenwinkel’s lawyers, Jane Dorotik, a former inmate and now part of  the support group California Coalition for Women Prisoners, said, “Those of us who served time with her came to know her as a thoughtful, gentle, and kind person – someone deeply dedicated to creating a safe, caring environment.”

Relatives of the murder victims have not been persuaded.

“I beg the board to consider parole for Patricia Krenwinkel only when her victims are paroled from their graves,” Anthony Demaria, a nephew of victim Jay Sebring, testified at one of her hearings.

And Patrick Sequeira, a prosecutor in the murder cases, told the board that if Krenwinkel “truly understood her crimes and the horrific nature of it, she wouldn’t be here at a parole hearing. She would just accept a punishment.”

Not so, said her lead attorney, Keith Wattley, executive director of UnCommon Law, an Oakland-based firm that represents inmates seeking parole.

“Pat has fully accepted responsibility for everything she did, everything she contributed to, every twisted philosophy she embraced and endorsed and, most importantly, every life she destroyed by her actions in 1969,” Wattley said in a statement after the board’s latest decision.

“Now it’s the Governor’s turn to show that he believes in law and order when the law requires a person’s release despite public outcry.” 

Will Gov. Newsom try to argue that Krenwinkel has no insight? The predictable political move would be, of course, to oppose her release; he has nothing to lose and the crime is so notorious that considerable sectors of the public will applaud his veto even though Krenwinkel is a 77-year-old woman living a peaceful, laudable, infraction-free existence behind bars who has been incarcerated for 56 years. On the other hand, to the extent that California courts are willing to entertain claims of “lack of insight” insofar as they are connected to the crime of commitment, Krenwinkel’s involvement in the murders was considerably more serious than Van Houten’s.

As you’ll recall, Newsom was clobbered by the Court of Appeal when he tried the “lack of insight” claim in van Houten’s case: after all these years, said the court, you can’t even marshal “some evidence” that there’s no insight, which means the veto is a thinly veiled appeal to optics and infamy. We don’t know yet if there will be a veto here (I’m betting yes) and what form it will take (I’m betting some variation on the lack-of-insight theme with an effort to marshal more evidence than in the Van Houten veto). But if the courts accede to it, it will affirm that we’re preoccupied with optics and not with actual risk to society.

In Yesterday’s Monsters, I talked about the absurdity of expecting people to excavate their personal history for decades and provide carefully crafted narratives of who they were, who they are, why, how come, wherefore–and to come up with new ones every year. I haven’t read the latest parole hearing transcript in Krenwinkel’s case, but I read every parole hearing transcript of hers from 1978 to 2020. It’s hard to imagine what she could possibly say to demonstrate deep reflection that she hasn’t said already; she is an intelligent and thoughtful person. Unless, of course, one might say that there could never be some satisfying explanation for her crimes. But then again, isn’t that true for any heinous crime? Is there ever a scenario where someone could tell you about the crime, and you’d respond with a big sigh of relief and say, “yes, now we all get it; we’ve gotten to the bottom of this”? Why are we hanging our release decisions on this process of psychic excavation–and why is this a political matter?

I’ll keep track of this and report any developments from Sacramento.

Lone Wolf

Back when I was looking for clips from TV shows to screen in class, I came across a “behind the scenes” interview about the emergence of the Law & Order franchise. One of the producers said that the network noticed that audiences were shifting to the right, and they wanted to cater to that with a police-and-prosecution-focused show.

It’s interesting to compare that moment to the latest offerings on American streaming TV: Reacher on Amazon Prime and Tracker on CBS. Media outlets and blogs are rife with comparisons of the two heroes, but little has been said about how they fit the moment. Both series, based respectively on successful book series by Lee Child and Jeffrey Deaver, feature a lone wolf, aimless and homeless, “walking the Earth like Cain in Kung Fu.”

Jack Reacher is an ex-military-police investigator who, unwittingly, gets embroiled in criminal investigations. Brief example of his exploits:

Colter Shaw was raised by survivalist parents and puts his expertise to good use as a reward collector for missing people:

This trend is interesting, and in many ways flies in the face of both traditional narratives about law enforcement: the one that sees police officers as the good guys catching criminals, and the one flagging oppressions and abuses of power and calling to curtail law enforcement. Here we have private citizens who outclass and outperform the police; the police have qualms about cooperating with them, but benefit when they do. In one scene, an officer tells Shaw that he is nothing but a mercenary. Shaw replies: “You get paid, too. Doesn’t mean you don’t care.” In the course of the investigation, the two go to a home of a person of interest. The home is uninhabited, and the officer of course cannot enter without a warrant. Shaw, the private citizen, breaks a window, gets into the house, unlocks the door, and says, “I burglarized the home and you’re in hot pursuit” (thus falling into the exigent circumstances exception).

Our lone wolves are not presented as merely complementary to the police: they reach where the police cannot. Each of them is supported by a team that includes a technology whiz who can hack accounts and perform tech feats that leave the official forces far behind.

Most importantly, both guys are benevolent. They are unequivocally presented as fighting for the good guys. The supporting characters are diverse, and the women are resourceful, accomplished, self-actualized, and brave, which is what you’d expect from a TV show in 2025, so there are no culture wars or traditional bigotries at work; the operative variable, though, is an individual’s intellect, resourcefulness, and physical force.

This is not the classic right-wing stuff, though it does harken back to something similar: Lee Majors’ film The Last Chase (1981), which featured a former racecar driver rebelling against a tyrannical system that confiscated private vehicles. But where The Last Chase was a glorification of individuality through consumption and oil, Tracker and Reacher are both minimalists, anti-materialistic, and nurturing to children and women not unlike MacGyver (1985). It’s interesting that the reversion to the mean from the “Defund the Police” days was not “Fund the Police” but rather “outperform the police.”